Star Wars: Endor’s Shadow #3

Under the title of the comic series - “Star Wars: Endor’s Shadow” - the second Death Star looms large on the cover. Our heroine, Tyria D’Lace, stands with her back to the reader, facing the Death Star from a low angle. At the bottom middle edge of the image, the words, “A toy comic by Phil Wrede,” are displayed.

On the planet Thyferra, deep within a hidden Rebel Alliance base, Admiral Ackbar presents the intelligence Rebel agents have gathered on the second Death Star. A red hologram of the installation floats in the air behind him.

Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia Organa, and an unspecified R5 unit are in the audience for Ackbar’s presentation. Far outside the room, recent Alliance inductee Tyria D’Lace watches Ackbar in secret, on a personal device, via a signal sent from the R5 unit. She is appalled by what she sees.

Ackbar makes it sound like the Alliance believes it will be impossible to fight back against a second Death Star. Incensed, Tyria puts her device away and storms off to confront him.

Along the way, Tyria meets ace pilot Wedge Antilles, Major Gavin Derlin, and an E-B model labor droid (like NED-B from the Obi-Wan show).

Back inside the base, the B2 droid (like B2EMO from Andor) arrives to interrupt the presentation, and confront the R5. The B2 has detected its transmission to Tyria. Incensed, the R5 snaps out an electrical probe, to which the B2 does not respond enthusiastically.

Tyria again admits her ignorance of the truth of the original Death Star, but does not reveal what she’s seen Ackbar say. Wedge, Derlin, and the E-B are all dismayed.

The Alliance leadership learns of the recipient of the R5’s transmissions, and Ackbar sends the B2 to retrieve her.

Wedge shares the story of his own experience at the Battle of Yavin, as he was one of a handful of Alliance pilots to survive the attack.

Tyria expresses her admiration at the bravery of the pilots who assaulted the original Death Star. The E-B suggests she view her own acts of resistance on Thyferra in a continuum of anti-Imperial activity that includes the Alliance.

The B2 arrives to escort Tyria inside the base, and an off-the-cuff remark from the droid leads Derlin to suspect Tyria is some kind of Imperial double agent.

Tyria assures her comrades that she has no love for the Empire, and departs alongside the droid.

Ackbar dismisses the B2 right after it delivers Tyria, and the Mon Calamari admiral wastes no time in asking Tyria if she is an Imperial spy.

Tyria explains that she spied on Ackbar’s meeting because she’s used to knowing what’s going on, of having her perspective valued, and she did not appreciate being left out of major discussions.

Ackbar tries to explain to Tyria that she is not the only person involved in this alliance, but Luke steps in, in an attempt to clarify all their intentions.

Leia sides with Ackbar in deriding what Tyria did, but they both agree to let Luke try to speak with her, himself.

Ackbar and Leia leave Luke and Tyria as the shutters close, and the holoprojectors engage again.

Luke points to the large holographic display of the second Death Star, and the forest moon of Endor behind it.

In a flashback, a large Imperial transport departs from a Star Destroyer in orbit of Endor’s forest moon. In caption boxes, Luke explains that the site of the second Death Star’s construction was, in his opinion, chosen because of its relative isolation from hyperspace lanes, and because the landscape is vastly different from most successful Rebel activity against the Empire.

The transport enters the moon’s atmosphere, descends, and lands. Luke continues to explain that the instability of Imperial leadership can be used to the Alliance’s advantage, since the leader who decided on the moon, and had a plan for defending it, is no longer in charge of the site, and their plans have almost certainly been discarded.

Luke reveals the identity of the new commander of the Death Star site: Grand Moff Trigit (“played” here by the head of an action figure of Alfred Molina’s Doctor Otto Octavius from Spider-Man 2).

The credits for this comic, including the usernames of the Unsplash contributors whose photographs provided the background images (as well as images from NASA/JPL, and StarWars.com), the use of stock visual effects made by Action VFX, the use of fonts by Blambot, the character and certain background photography, plus script and lettering by me (Phil Wrede), and recognition of the creation of Star Wars by George Lucas, as well as its current ownership by Disney. Finally, special thanks to authors of the classic Rogue and Wraith Squadron books, Michael A. Stackpole and Aaron Allston, whose ideas I have definitely built upon in this story.

Welcome back to part three of Endor’s Shadow, the part of the tale where the inescapable Star Wars threat rears its gigantic spherical head again! Star Trek has the Borg, and Star Wars has the Death Star!

If you’re reading this comic on the day it goes live, I feel obliged to take a second to recognize the miracle of Star Wars media that just concluded, as the final episodes of the second season of Andor dropped yesterday. Rogue One is one of my absolute favorite Star Wars stories (I probably don’t need to admit that I spent significant time in junior high devouring every novel and comic that had Star Wars in the title that I could find), and to get to spend some more time with Cassian, that’s a gift I never imagined the universe would give us when I was sitting in the theater for Rogue One’s opening night.

This toy comic owes Rogue One a tremendous debt of gratitude (another declaration so obvious that I don’t need to make it), and while I rather doubt I’ll reach the bar it set, I hope at least to do the tradition of teams of desperate characters off on an almost-certainly hopeless mission stories proud.

In case this is your first time visiting Pizzarat.net, or your first issue of Endor’s Shadow… Welcome! I’m so glad you’re here! I hope you’ll hang around for a while and read some more comics! If you haven’t read the first two issues of this story yet, why not start there? Click here for the first installment, and here for the second.

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